By Miodrag Kojadinović –
It is my fault. I should have found more
time to care for my mother the way she
and I together cared for my father as the
light of mind was twinkling and going
extinct in his Alzheimer’s ravaged brain.
It is my fault. I should have known how
despicably vain, stupidly selfish, medical
workers get, from the lowly paramedics to
the haughtiest of ward chiefs at that typical
shabby provincial hospital I knew so well.
It is my fault. I should have never quarrelled
with mom in her last days, over trifles, as
families do; I should have solaced her, made
her wish to carry on, for me, even though
when dad died, desolate, she wailed “my only
true love, how will I go on without you?”
It is my fault. I needed to shout at disinterested,
condescending, nurses and rude doctors barely
out of their residence, I should have banged my
hand on the table, stood my ground, refused
to budge, not let them push me out of the
emergency room when mom begged me to
prop her up, so she would not drown in fluid
in her lungs suffering from pulmonary oedema,
a heart failure which vain hospital morons kept
calling “probably covid”, despite a negative test,
despite the fact her death report will say “non-
contagious”, but be only delivered eight days
too late, after I was forced to have her buried
in a bag, a metal casket and only then on top
of everything the decent heavy oak coffin, as a
thin veneer of civility amidst vile, evil, dumb
never forgivable oppression of the Coronomor.
It is my fault. I shouldn’t have returned to the
destitute Serbia, should’ve evacuated my mom
and dad, even to Canada that I hated and keep
on hating, perhaps even more than wretched
Serbia. Death in Canada would likely have
been more dignified, though I no longer know:
the covidmaniac catastrophe has killed all last
traces of decency by polities, in my world.
